Southern Oregon University students, faculty, staff and visitors can now skip payment at meters and purchase parking permits remotely with newly launched parking app, PayByPhone. PayByPhone’s unveiling at Southern Oregon joins other notable university deployments at The University of California, Berkeley and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Acting as an alternative to cash payments, the mobile parking app will provide drivers with a quick means to make payments, while enabling university parking services to better manage parking locations on campus.

“After seeing its success at other universities, we are confident that PayByPhone will ease the parking experience for any visitor to our campus,” says Frederick Creek, Director of Campus Public Safety and Parking at Southern Oregon. “We can’t wait to see how it assists commuters, and the Parking Services department throughout the year.”

Similar to other parking apps on the market, the deployment at Southern Oregon will boost convenience for drivers. PayByPhone will enable drivers at SOU to choose from hourly, daily, three-day, or weekly permits. The new service will also send text reminders prior to a parking session expiring, and enable drivers to extend a parking session remotely.

More unique to PayByPhone, drivers can also begin a parking session without registering for the app, and habitual parkers can use the “favorites” feature to save the location numbers of parking spots that they frequently use.

The app is backed by support from parent company Volkswagen Financial Services, and recorded significant growth over the past year with the university space proving to be particularly popular. The app can now be found on over 20 North American campuses, with more recent deployments going live on the campuses of San Diego State University and Eastern Washington University during 2017.

“The administrative side to the program is so user friendly and much more detailed than the other companies,” says Michelle Rasmussen, Parking Director, Eastern Washington University. “PayByPhone is a well-oiled machine as I like to call it. They have something that works very well for the staff and the end-user and I cannot recommend them highly enough.”